I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not has as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat . I’m still working through my notes and posting fragments - here are some more:  ❄                ❄ What role do senior developers play as LLMs become established? As befits a gathering of many senior developers, we felt we sti...

I wondered if it would snow again this season. The weather has been persistently cloudy, but there has been little snow. Today, the weather changed. Just as I was about to go out for a walk, it started snowing heavily. It has been months since I have seen the snow like I did today: flowing down from the blank white and grey clouds with full intensity. I looked up out the window and revelled in being able to see the icy snowflakes fall from the sky. The weather gave me pause about going out for a...

I saw Proust’s questionnaire on James' Blog and I thought I should try it out. Funnily enough I got Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" as audiobook CDs for my birthday, because I thought it was funny that there was actually an audiobook. It's 7 days long, btw. Read more on the site… I saw Proust’s questionnaire on James' Blog and I thought I should try it out. Funnily enough I got Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" as audiobook CDs for my birthday, because I thought it w...

I have no need for a 3D printer. Funny, I just read that somewhere else, almost as though it was in the heading. 3D printers take up a lot of space, come with more consumables I’d need to purchase on a regular basis, would require me to learn 3D modelling, and the whole thing looks like a massive rabbithole that would feed into my obsessive side. I also don’t need a 3D printer, because there’s nothing I “need” to 3D print. But there are some things that are quite nice. A few of...

A reader worried about the future. I am writing this email as a young aspiring researcher/scientist. We live in a period of uncertainty and I have a lot of doubts about the decisions I should make. I've always been interested in mathematics and physics and I believe that a career in this area would be a fulfilling one for me. However, with the development of AI I'm starting to have some worries about my future. It is difficult to understand what is really happening. It feels like everyday these ...

I thought that 2025 was weird and didn't think it could get much weirder. 2026 is really delivering in the weirdness department. An AI agent opened a PR to matplotlib with a trivial performance optimization, a maintainer closed it for being made by an autonomous AI agent, so the AI agent made a callout blogpost accusing the matplotlib team of gatekeeping . This provoked many reactions: Aoi What. Why? How? What? Are we really at the point where AI agents make callou...

Recently I have started going Raw+DC on my databases . I think I love it. Let me explain. TL;DR; After 25+ years championing ORMs, I’ve switched to raw database queries paired with Python dataclasses. I’m calling it the Raw+DC pattern . The result: better AI coding assistance, fewer aging dependencies, comparable or better performance, and type safety where it counts. ORM/ODM Raw+DC Pattern Type safety...

That expectation is linear is one of my favourite facts. I got a first taste of this when I was doing an internship at an unnamed trading firm. Some guy was teaching me the basics of trading and showing me how traders (of which I was not one) were expected to have heuristics that would allow them to make snap judgments about things like expectation. As an example, he asked me, in more words, what the expected rank when flipping over the top card of a deck of cards was (A=1, J=11, Q=12, K=13). ...

Hivemind autonomy software will fly aboard Anduril’s Fury (YFQ-44A)   WASHINGTON (February 13, 2026) — Shield AI, the deep ‑ tech company building state ‑ of ‑ the ‑ art autonomy software products and aircraft, today announced its selection as a mission autonomy provider supporting the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Shield AI was selected following a competitive evaluation to support mission autonomy Technology Maturity and Risk Reduction (TMRR) e...

I was listening to a recent episode of The Rest is Science (fantastic Podcast, by the way - go listen), and in this particular episode Michael and Hannah were discussing boredom. At one point in the episode, Michael mentions an experiment where Dutch scientists put a hamster wheel out in the wild. The theory goes that we humans put a wheel in the hamster cage to provide the little guy with some stimulation, as they can't go running around the woods any more. But the experiment had some i...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with David Cain, whose blog can be found at raptitude.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Mike Walsh and the other 116 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m...

In Caddy the syntax is different: https://www.redblobgames 301 } Now it will 301-redirect " https://www.redblobgames/) " to " https://www.redblobgames/ ". For both of these web servers, I never remember what characters need to be escaped, and I kind of wish I could use existing programming language syntax with delimiters like /^(.*)[;:,.)]$/ or r'^(.*)[;:,.)]$' . In Caddy the syntax is different: https://www.redblobgames 301 } Now it will 301-redirect...

I am quite content to be alone except on a mild evening at twilight.  During the quick hours of the day I am busy. Busy with things I enjoy doing, for the most part. Or busy with people I enjoy being around. I count myself among the luckiest alive.  During the night I am dreaming. Night is dreaming time whether I am asleep or awake. The dreams are all mine. I stretch out in the bed and in my mind. I  never had such space before. Even in my childhood, my dreams were so small, so bordered. ...

A key challenge working with coding agents is having them both test what they’ve built and demonstrate that software to you, their supervisor. This goes beyond automated tests - we need artifacts that show their progress and help us see exactly what the agent-produced software is able to do. I’ve just released two new tools aimed at this problem: Showboat and Rodney . Proving code actually works Showboat: Agents build documents to demo their work Rodney: CLI browser automat...

Programming Aphorisms Feb 11, 2026 A meta programming post — looking at my thought process when coding and trying to pin down what is programming “knowledge”. Turns out, a significant fraction of that is just reducing new problems to a vocabulary of known tricks. This is a personal, descriptive post, not a prescriptive post for you. It starts with a question posted on Ziggit. The background here is that Zig is in the process of removing ambient IO capabilities. Currently, you can...

“Home is behind, the world ahead and there are many paths to tread, through shadows to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight.” ― The Lord of the Rings My journey began with a few obstacles. After boarding the plane to Qatar, it took more than three hours for the departure. First, we went for the mandatory de-icing. Then, there was a medical emergency on board, which took so long that a second de-icing was necessary. Safety goes first, and it was all beyond control, but ...

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES , I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion. HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate that setup in the keynote, it's not, as Jensen put it, "utterly trivial now." When I saw J...

(This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity. I plan on publishing one chapter a month on the newsletter, and aim to have the full report done by the end of the year.) For decades, American construction has fallen behind almost every other major sector in productivity growth. As far back as 1970 researchers noted that construction productivity improvement significantly lagged productivity impro...

It was Matthew Arnold who first dubbed Oxford as “the city of dreaming spires.” It really is a magical place.  A place with strong ties to fantasy.   Philip Pullman, Alan Garner, William Morris, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman, and of course the Inklings, among them C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.   A grand company.  Understandably, I was honored when I was invited to return there in November, to address the Oxford Union, and sign a few books. I spoke on November 4, to a full house. ...

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plott...

Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... Read More Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... Read More Reviving manufacturing doesn't require a planned economy, just a better business model.  ... ... Read More Read More

A PSLV rocket, and its fairing being prepared pre-launch. One human on the bottom right of the left image for scale. Images: ISRO The January 12 launch of India’s PSLV rocket failed due to the third stage’s mysteriously anomalous performance, the resulting tumbling of which was visible even on telemetry screens in the mission control and livestream. 16 spacecraft were lost to the air and sea, spanning a key national hyperspectral satellite , seven private Indian ones, five from Brazil,...

Here's a story I tell my mentees often—and it's one where I almost made an expensive mistake. A few years ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding the authentication system for one of our core products. We walked into that room with a massive assumption already locked and loaded: "Authentication isn't our core business. We should buy, not build." It made perfect sense on paper. We assumed buying a vendor solution like Auth0 would be faster, safer, and cheaper. We assumed building it oursel...